Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Chambertin Clos de Bèze Grand Cru is showing beautifully, bursting from the glass with a maturing bouquet of wild berries, blood orange, black truffles, spices and rich forest floor. On the palate, the wine is medium to full-bodied, broad and enveloping, with melting tannins, a generous core of fruit and a long, penetrating finish. In keeping with the vintage—which was characterized by long hang time but cool conditions—it's a Clos de Bèze that displays mature, even autumnal fruit tones as well as tangy acids, making for a wine that's simultaneously supple and penetrating. The finest of these cellar selections from Bouchard, this will drink well for a decade.
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Wine Spectator
The core of sweet fruit and the dense structure reveal this red’s potential. Macerated cherry, raspberry, oak spice and graphite flavors ride the tannins to the long, tensile finish. Best from 2019 through 2034.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
The origin of perhaps the world’s very finest Pinot Noir, Côte de Nuits is the northern half of the Côte d'Or and includes the famous wine villages of Gevrey-Chambertin, Morey-St-Denis, Chambolle-Musigny, Vougeot, Vosne-Romanée, Flagey-Echezeaux and Nuits-St-Georges.
Fine whites from Chardonnay are certainly found in the Côte de Nuits, but with much less frequency than top-performing reds made of Pinot noir. The little village of Nuits-St-Georges in its southern end gave the region its name: Côte de Nuits. The city of Dijon marks its northern border.